Contents ######################################################################### 1. Announcements ---------------- * The ODF Toolkit Project * ODF Toolkit – What is it going to be 2. Success Stories ------------------ * French Ministry saved 1.2M Euros with OpenOffice.org * Italy adopts OpenDocument as a National Standard * Province in the northeast of Argentina adopts ODF * South African CSIR adopts ODF * Indian state Tamil Nadu adopts open source 3. Featured News ---------------- * Successful Community Project: Smart Tags * "OpenOffice.org Aqua : Top 10 of issues to be fixed before public release" * New EU report about the impact of open source * Report about OpenOffice.org's adoption * "UK government agency tells schools to ignore Vista" 4. Tips & Tricks ---------------- * Free online OpenOffice.org tutorials * A Matter Of Styles * Bruce Byfield about the customization of settings * Bruce Byfield about formatting cells in Calc * Fuzzy logic extension for OpenOffice.org * ODF and the statistical package R 5. OpenDocument News Roundup 6. Clippings All news for this month can be found at: http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_ooonewsletter_archive.html ######################################################################### Want to help OpenOffice.org? Find out hot to contribute or see our To Do List!! http://www.openoffice.org/contributing.html http://development.openoffice.org/todo.html ######################################################################### Announcements ######################################################################### The ODF Toolkit Project ----------------------- "The future of OpenOffice.org extends beyond the office suite. With the creation of our new ODF Toolkit Project (http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org/), which we are announcing today, we are inviting developers everywhere to take the source of the world's leading Free and Open office productivity suite in bold new directions. These may include technologies that engage tools for collaboration, communication and content creation of every kind; tools that will complement and even transcend the already powerful productivity suite. The anchor of this new project is the OpenDocument Format (ODF), the ISO and OASIS standard format for office applications and the most flexible and adaptable format for the future." http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=announce&msgNo=314 ODF Toolkit – What is it going to be ------------------------------------ "Think about it! Or better join the new ODF Toolkit project. Don't forget to subscribe to the dev [ at ] odftoolkit [ dot ] openoffice [ dot ] org mailing list to participate in all the upcoming discussions. Bring in your ideas, your man power and help that this project becomes a success." http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/odf_toolkit_what_is_it Success Stories ######################################################################### French Ministry saved 1.2M Euros with OpenOffice.org ---------------------------------------------------- "According to this French article the French Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing saved 1.2M Euros with OpenOffice.org. The switch to OpenOffice.org cost them 1.5M Euros, but the renewal of Microsoft Office licenses would have cost them 2.7M Euros." http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/french_ministry_saved_1_2m Italy adopts OpenDocument as a National Standard ------------------------------------------------ "Italy has adopted The OpenDocument Format (ISO/IEC 23600) as a national standard." http://technocrat.net/d/2007/1/29/13965 Province in the northeast of Argentina adopts ODF ------------------------------------------------- "Misiones, a province in the northeast of Argentina, became the first regional government in Latin America to adopt ODF." http://www.odfalliance.org/mail_list.php South African CSIR adopts ODF ----------------------------- "CSIR President and CEO Dr Sibusiso Sibisi, a well-known proponent of OSS and the driving force behind the CSIR's adoption, said "the open document standards are of prime importance for allowing open access to information, now and in the future. By using open document standards to store our data, the CSIR is not locked into a specific vendor that developed and implemented a proprietary standard, thus eliminating the risk of not being able to access current data in future when such a standard may cease to be supported." "The maturity of OpenOffice, a powerful open source office suite that implements ODF, has in turn enabled the CSIR to adopt ODF without major obstacles," he said." http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=1335 Indian state Tamil Nadu adopts open source ------------------------------------------ "According to this Spanish article the government of the state of Tamil Nadu in India has made the decision to migrate 99% of his Windows systems to open source software in 2007. 30,000 government employees are expected to switch to OpenOffice.org." http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/open_source_adoption_by_indian Featured News ######################################################################### Successful Community Project: Smart Tags ---------------------------------------- "It is my pleasure to announce a successful community project: Jakob Lechner of Fabalabs Software GmbH made a great code contribution that allows to register external components that can be used to add Smart Tags to your Writer Documents." http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/successful_community_project_smart_tags "OpenOffice.org Aqua : Top 10 of issues to be fixed before public release" -------------------------------------------------------------------------- "During 19th January meeting it was proposed the Top 10 of issues before public release. Means, once fixed those 10 issues, a public version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X, running natively, without X11, will be available for download." http://eric.bachard.free.fr/news/2007/01/openofficeorg-aqua-top-10-of-issues-to.html New EU report about the impact of open source --------------------------------------------- A new report about the impact of open source has been published by the EU. Here are a few hightlights: * According to figure 12 on page 29 OpenOffice.org is more popular than Samba within European public bodies. * According to table 1 on page 31 more than 90% of the surveyed Brazilian government organization and more than 70% of the Indian government organizations are using OpenOffice.org. * According to paragraph 6.2.3.8 on page 35 a market share of 8% in German businesses is estimated for OpenOffice.org. * Quote from page 102: "Indeed, the group of users was also asked whether as a result of the experimentation they thought they could do with OpenOffice the same amount of work they could do with Microsoft Office. As shown in Figure 46, under 10% of respondents thought they could not, more than 20% thought they definitely could perform as well with OpenOffice, while almost 60% thought they could be as productive with OpenOffice (as confirmed by the time-use analysis) though with some problems. Given their previous lack of experience with OpenOffice the fact that problems were subjectively perceived is unsurprising, but the fact that objectively the productivity of users remained the same and did not reduce is important." * An interesting read is also table 45, "Conclusions from the comparison of the usage of OOo and MSO in the organizations", on page 244. The PDF document can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf Report about OpenOffice.org's adoption -------------------------------------- "The FOSS Observatory (Observatoire du logiciel libre (french link)) has published a report (the PDF document) concerning the progress of the adoption of some FOSS. Their study is based on the demand of training instead of the number of licenses sold, which is more interesting for this type of software and which allows to measure the interest of companies and administrations for them. This report points out that Openoffice" http://lebasket.free.fr/blog/index.php?2007/01/25/7-report-about-ooo-s-adoption "UK government agency tells schools to ignore Vista" ---------------------------------------------------- "The UK government agency responsible for technology in education has warned schools and colleges against deploying Microsoft Corp's Windows Vista and Office 2007 products, noting that for Vista especially 'the risks are high, and the benefits are far from clear.'" http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/uk_government_agency_tells_schools Tips & Tricks ######################################################################### Free online OpenOffice.org tutorials ------------------------------------ "Today In Pictures launched its new line of free computer how-to tutorials, available at www.inpics.net. There are 12 online tutorials, including OpenOffice.org. The tutorials can be used by anyone, free of charge." http://ooonewsletter.blogspot.com/2007/01/free-online-openoffice-tutorials.html A Matter Of Styles ------------------ " In my last blog about the Writer project I talked about ideas to avoid the explicit usage of styles for some functions in Writer because understanding styles (especially page styles) shouldn't be a necessary precondition to use these functions. In some of the replies I received it was suggested to strengthen the use of styles and to use them even more. Fine, I don't see a contradiction here! We can think about new and better ways to use styles for more productive work – if we still make sure that all functions that not really need styles can be used without them." http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/date/20070115 Bruce Byfield about the customization of settings ------------------------------------------------- "Frankly, the logic with which options are arranged in tabs under these headings is a little elusive. For that reason, when looking to customize OOo, you should not just look at any tab whose name seems related to your purpose, but scan all of them for additional features. This necessity becomes obvious when you consider four common use-cases: setting automated features, reducing memory requirements, setting security options, and enabling assistive options -- although none of these by any means exhausts the array of options that OpenOffice.org makes available." http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000170 Bruce Byfield about formatting cells in Calc -------------------------------------------- "Certainly, few people worry about their layout than the layout of text documents. Still, even if you share this attitude, learning the basic formatting options for cells in OpenOffice.org Calc can be worth your time. Many of the options directly effect how you interact with spreadsheets, and even the purely visual ones can make your lists and calculations easier to read at a glance." http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000154 Fuzzy logic extension for OpenOffice.org ---------------------------------------- "InrecoLAN FuzzyMath allows to use uncertain or approximate values in OpenOffice.org Calc. It means with InrecoLAN FuzzyMath you can perform ordinary arithmetic operations and use ordinary mathematical and financial functions with uncertain values as if they are standard, or crisp, numbers." http://www.openfuzzymath.org/ ODF and the statistical package R --------------------------------- "For those of you who like OpenOffice.org and have to do a lot of statistical analysis might find the odfWeave package interesting. This R newsletter includes a short tutorial. Users looking for business intelligence solutions might want to watch the progress of Palo. In general, many OpenOffice.org and ODF related solutions are listed on this wiki page." http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/odf_and_the_statistical_package OpenDocument News Roundup ######################################################################### The Contradictory Nature of OOXML --------------------------------- "During the first one-month step, any member may submit "contradictions," which, loosely defined, means aspects in which a proposed standard conflicts with already adopted ISO/IEC standards and Directives. Those contradictions must then be "resolved" (which does not necessarily mean eliminated), and these resolutions are then presented back to the members during the second stage to consider as part of the voting package. During this second, five-month step, other objections, questions and comments can be offered by members. (For more detail on the rules relating to contradictions and what can be raised during this phase, see the excellent writeup at the OpenDocument Fellowship site.)" http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070117145745854 OOXML v. ODF: What a Week! -------------------------- "It's been an unusually active week in the contest between already ISO-adopted ODF and OOXML, as the latter moves through the first step of the ISO the adoption process. More specifically, Ecma submitted OOXML to the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) on January 5, starting the clock on the traditional one-month "contradictions" period that begins the "fast track" process in the JTC1. However, OOXML is no traditional specification, weighing in at over 6,000 pages. During this phase, eligible JTC1 members can note ways in which the proposed standard overlaps other standards, fails to incorporate available ISO standards, or otherwise does not meet ISO rules (a second, five month period will begin on February 5, during which technical and other objections may be raised)." http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070125060934582 EOOXML objections ----------------- http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections A Review of the Wikipedia Article on ODF ---------------------------------------- "As I had done last week with the Wikipedia article on Office Open XML (OOXML), I have taken a read through the article on OpenDocument Format (ODF). My aim was to do some fact checking and make some suggestions on some additional references that might be included. In some case I've made additional usage or phrasing suggestions, but I have not endeavored to do a full edit of the article. In accordance with Wikipedia's Conflict of Interest guidelines, I will put a link to this blog entry on the ODF article's Talk page. These points are for the consideration of the volunteers editing the article, to consider and do what they want with them. I'll probably repeat this review on a quarterly basis." http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/review-of-wikipedia-article-on-odf.html Accessibility tool with ODF support ----------------------------------- People interested in accessibility tools with ODF support might want to check out the EUAIN project: http://braillenet.althosting.net/index.jsp http://braillenet.althosting.net/converters/index.jsp Microsoft's Alan Yates about ODF -------------------------------- http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/microsoft_s_alan_yates_about1 Clippings ######################################################################### * "Office 2007 a slow burner for businesses" http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,61984518,00.htm * German "federal center for political education" explains open source http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/german_federal_center_for_political * "Amsterdam threatens move to open source" http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/amsterdam_threatens_move_to_open Newsletter Archive ######################################################################### Past issues of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter can be found in the archive of the announce mailing list: http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=announce Contact Information (regarding this newsletter) ######################################################################### newsletter [ at ] marketing [ dot ] openoffice [ dot ] org